Thrilling voyeurism: Rush read about an Australian art scam to prepare for the role of auctioneer Virgil Oldman in The Best Offer. Photo: Supplied

Geoffrey Rush knew he'd made it when his then six-year-old daughter, Angelica, discovered him on a Fantales wrapper. That was many years ago when, apparently, his primary claim to fame was that, once upon a time, he'd shared digs with Mel Gibson and played alongside him in Waiting for Godot. Since then, though, a lot has happened.

Acclaim for his work as a stage actor has resounded around the world. For his Broadway performance in Eugene Ionesco's Exit the King, Rush not only earned applause that could be heard from Australia, but also won a Tony for his efforts, his acceptance speech memorably thanking ''Manhattan audiences for proving that French existential absurdist tragicomedy rocks''.

The moment you first [meet a director] you get a feeling about what's ahead. It's kind of like you're auditioning each other.

He won an Oscar in 1997 (for Shine) and received three further nominations (for Shakespeare in Love in 1999, Quills in 2000, and The King's Speech in 2011). In 2005, an Emmy followed for the title role in The Life & Death of Peter Sellers.

In 2011, Australian critic Peter Craven declared that ''if our country still allowed the creation of theatre knights, we'd be talking about Sir Geoffrey Rush''. A few years earlier, during a visit to the Melbourne Writers Festival, David Denby, the esteemed film critic for The New Yorker, observed that Rush is ''not just one of the great Australian screen actors, but one of the great actors, period''.

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I have been watching Rush for more than 30 years on the stage and screens big and small*. I have always been more than slightly in awe of his prodigious talent as an actor, his ability to surrender himself completely to a role as if it somehow came from deep inside rather than from the imagination of a writer with the help of a variety of collaborators.

Given all this, you would expect Rush to be very serious about what he does for a crust. Which he is. What you might not expect, though, is the mischievous sense of fun he brings to it, without sacrificing any of the intensity. It's a rare gift, one he believes was bestowed upon him by a specifically Australian tradition.

He explains: ''In my second year as an actor at the Queensland Theatre Company [in 1972], we had a guest English director and, once, during his traditional 4pm afternoon-tea break, he was sitting around holding court. He was a very good director, but pretty old-school, I think. And he was sitting around pontificating about how he'd never seen white-hot acting on the Australian stage.

''Then I thought back to things I'd seen, to Bobby le Brun's Dame Trot in Jack and the Beanstalk, which I believed was the best thing I'd ever seen - this was in 1958 - to Gordon Chater being astonishing on The Mavis Bramston Show, to the Sorlies' travelling tent shows, to the genius of Roy Rene, or Jim Gerald working for the Tivoli circuit. Maybe their work isn't in the Anglo tradition we've grown up in, but what do you mean we can't do white-hot acting here?''

That Rush sees his roots in this tradition is evident in his account of his early years as an actor at university in Brisbane. There he threw himself into a variety of theatrical endeavours, including the student revues, in which he allowed his inner clown to take charge. He remembers one of them very well: ''Entering in a tie-dyed T-shirt and tie-dyed jeans, I declared, 'This is a student revue. You're no doubt expecting a nude scene, so we'd better get it over with.' Deadpan, I fully disrobed with virtuosic rapidity. BLACKOUT. It brought the house down … [Afterwards] Alan Edwards … the first director of the Queensland Theatre Company, scalping for talent, offered me my first professional job. He must have thought I had a big future in front of me.''

Rush believes that traces of this showfolk tradition can be found in the work of many other Australians who have taken to the stage or screen. ''I think it's seeped into the work of Baz Luhrmann and Benedict Andrews and Barrie Kosky, John Bell, certainly. I think we're all indebted to that kind of rough magic … What appealed to me when I read Exit the King was not so much the philosophical discourse but that the king falls over more than 20 times.''

As well as the support of his mother - Rush still remembers her saying, as her teenage thespian headed off with the Queensland Theatre Company, ''You do what you need to do, lovey'' - a significant factor in Rush's professional development was the time he spent in Paris studying at the school founded in 1956 by legendary actor and mime artist Jacques Lecoq.

It was there he began to formulate a systematic approach to his craft, one he has applied to his work on stage and to the many films he has made, from his debut in a bit part in Hoodwink (1981) to The Best Offer, directed by Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso), which opens in Australia later this month.

''I always like to get a sense of the design I'm going to be working in,'' he says. ''What does the shape of this character look like as a figure in that landscape or in that space? I start to think about moving towards finding an outline or a silhouette that is going to have a subliminal impact … kind of like mask work, which I suppose is coming from the Lecoq training: how do you radiate out from that, how do you find the locomotion of the character, how do you find contradictions within that character?

''I always remember Lecoq telling us, when we were doing clowning, to take a look at Chaplin. In his tramp costume, you get this rather prissy, wannabe middle-class figure, tight upper body, shabby but attempting to look acceptable and proper. Then the bottom half is this loose, baggy-pants, shuffling character. And he's got the accoutrements of a bowler hat and a cane, which gives him the little man, middle-man class pretensions … I thought about that lesson a lot when I was working on the Peter Sellers film.''

As well as the mentoring from Warren Mitchell, when he played the Fool in 1978 to Mitchell's King Lear, he wants to acknowledge his many theatrical collaborations over the years with directors Neil Armfield and Simon Phillips. He's also grateful for the chance he had to work with Jim Sharman in 1982, on A Midsummer Night's Dream, although it didn't quite go as he had anticipated.

''I was generally a prose comedian,'' he says with a prankish grin and raised eyebrows. ''I was never really a verse actor. But he'd cast me as Oberon and I came out and did the big monologue at the beginning and thought, 'I'm having a fairly good go at this.' Then Jim very playfully and slyly said, 'Well, that's very good … for the suburban Oberon. Do you think we might see something a little closer to the king of the fairies?' Inside I seethed a bit, but then I went back and thought, 'F--- you. All right, here we go,'' and I was 20 times better. Having that kind of challenge makes your work better.''

Rush sees his involvement in a film project as an ongoing process of negotiation with whoever's calling the shots behind the camera. It begins when he first meets a filmmaker. ''The moment you first get together for a chat, you get a feeling about what's ahead. It's kind of like you're auditioning each other,'' he says. ''There have been some situations where I've declined a part because I've thought that there's no way I could match this director's version of it, or because I simply don't like it.

''Without naming names,'' he says, ''there was one director in America on a fairly big blockbuster film who told me that he liked to do lots and lots of different takes. 'Make that happier! Make that louder! Make that sadder!' And I thought, 'What, so you can then cut together a performance that I had no active involvement with?' I want to work the contradictions out in a positive fashion rather than just leaving someone with endless footage to play with down the track. Let's do it in the rhythm of the shoot.''

He loves to immerse himself in the kind of research required to get the detail right: whether it's learning to play a piano (Shine), a piano accordion (The Book Thief), or to wield a sword (Pirates of the Caribbean). When he was working to get inside the skin of art auctioneer Virgil Oldman in The Best Offer, the hook became the mindset behind ''the auctioneer's chant''.

''By good fortune,'' he says, ''when I was preparing for it, there was a huge art scam going on in Australia about the authenticity of certain Brett Whiteley paintings. I read all that with interest and wondered why people are so fascinated by these things. And it's because in an auction, within a minute maybe $10 million goes under the hammer, which creates a thrilling kind of voyeurism.

''In the articles I'd looked up, I read a comment by an Australian art auctioneer, Roger McIlroy, and saw that he was based in London and also had an office in Melbourne. I rang the office and asked the woman who answered how I could contact him in London and she said, 'Oh, he's sitting right next to me here.' So he came over and we had a really good chat about the kind of ego that an auctioneer on the podium needs. It's not unlike being an actor or a lawyer. You have your moment in a certain space to charge up.''

Next up for Rush is the fifth instalment of the ongoing Pirates of the Caribbean series, which begins shooting at the end of the year. An adaptation with Fred Schepisi of Don McKellar and Bob Martin's irresistible musical play, The Drowsy Chaperone, is also ''in the works'', along with a new project with regular collaborator Armfield. ''Neil and I are in talks to upset the apple cart,'' Rush notes with the customary twinkle and a vaudevillian's flourish.